Oracle Announces Self-Patching Database

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Oracle has annouced a groundbreaking new approach to cybersecurity - databases that can patch themselves. Reported yesterday at the Oracle OpenWorld conference by Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, the new database platform uses automation technology to keep itself up to date. And, it can do this without needing to be offline, something that is uncommon in the market. As we have seen in recent news, the need to keep cybersecurity patches up to date is critical, as the magnitude and cause of the Equifax breech has shown. However, many enterprises delay patches because of the downtime involved, or even the feeling that the risk of exploitation isn't worth the IT or production hassle.

The database, called Oracle 18c, requires no human intervention to be up to date so everything happens automatically. This proves its worth when it comes to the discovery of serious vulnerabilities that hackers take advantage of. And, machine learning is now included in the tech so that the process can fine tune itself over time. This automation also returns cost savings and fewer errors during IT maintenance as well - "There is no pilot error anymore, because there is no pilot," Ellison said. "Therefore, we can guarantee an availability time of 99.95%. That's less than 30 minutes a year of planned or unplanned downtime."

The Oracle 18c's closest competitor is Amazon Web Services' Redshift, but it is already proving more flexible and cost effective than the latter due to its ability to rapidly free up resouces for heavy workloads.

This article was based on a October 1, 2017 Business Insider article by Becky Peterson. Read it here.